[00:00:00] Speaker A: Do you or your partner struggle to feel free and uninhibited in the bedroom? Shame could very likely be the culprit. Sexual shame is deep and pervasive, even in today's society. We've made some progress as a culture, but we still have a long ways to go. In today's episode, I sit down with a renowned expert on sexual shame. We talk about when and how sexual shame worked its way into the collective psyche and discuss strategies to overcome it. You do not want to miss this one. Let's meet our guest. Doctor Tina Shermer Sellers is a licensed sex and gender feminist psychotherapist, best selling author, researcher, emeriti professor, and media personality whose expertise spans sex therapy, spiritual intimacy, parenting, medicine, and social justice. Known for exposing the impact of patriarchy and sexual shame on our ability to securely attach to our partners and instruct our children to attach to theirs. Doctor Sellers book, Sex, God and the Conservative Church, erases raising shame from sexual intimacy has had a global impact. Her latest book, shameless, everything you need to raise shame free, confident kids, and heal your shame two was a new release bestseller in eight categories. So without further ado, let's dive in.
Doctor Tina, welcome to the show.
[00:01:24] Speaker B: Thank you so much. I'm so glad to be here with you.
[00:01:27] Speaker C: Emily, I am so happy to have you here because the topic of today's episode is so important. We are going to be diving into the topic of sexual shame, which unfortunately, is still a very deep and pervasive issue for a lot of people, women in particular, as it relates to sex, and I think one of the biggest blockers to sexual freedom and disinhibition. So I cannot wait to dive right in. Before we get into it, though, I'd love to hear a little bit about you and how you got into the field and how this became a topic of interest for you.
[00:02:06] Speaker B: Yeah, gosh, it's kind of a little bit of a circuitous story. So I certainly didn't set out to basically take on the impact of empire Christianity on sexuality and sexual health and intimacy. I didn't intend to that, but it all kind of came to me. And as I look back, I think it's not by chance it's complete providence that it did. I had the good fortune of growing up in a swedish immigrant home that was very body and sex positive. And so I didn't know that was unusual. I thought every family was like this. I could talk to aunts and uncles and grandparents and parents and did, and have hundreds of very funny stories and lovely stories. About talking about life and relationships and sexuality just along the way. Um, then I started out as a junior high teacher. Realized there were. There's too much going on in the lives of kids to keep them from learning. So I thought, okay, I'm going to go back to school and study family therapy. Did that. Ended up getting hired in the program I had just graduated from. So I taught in an MFT post our graduate program for 28 years. One of the courses that I taught, and it was just really one of the courses I really specialized in medical family therapy, the impact of chronic illness on our lives and our lives on our health. But I taught the human sexuality course, which was a required course for licensure in the state of Washington, which is where I was.
This was in the early nineties. I taught that class for over 25 years.
One of the assignments I had my students do was write their sexual autobiography. And they would hear about this at the beginning of the program, and I'd be like, yeah, it's one of your last classes. Take a deep breath. You will have reflected on your life through so many lenses by the time you get to me that it won't feel as scary as it sounds right now. But here's the deal. You're only ever as good a therapist as you know what your own stories are, where you begin and end and your clients begin. And you cannot afford to get those confused, given that we live in the country that we do that doesn't have comprehensive sex education.
Your story is likely not a cohesive narrative inside of you, and you need a little bit of time to reflect and get an arc of a story. And that's what I want you to do with this. So I gave them like, 70 questions, and I said, I'm not asking you to answer everyone, but I want you to notice the arc of what I'm asking you to write about. And then I want you to write about it. And then I want you to reflect, as you've done this, as to whether that legacy that you're carrying is the one you want to carry forward or whether you want to make some changes and adjustments. Cause that's important.
So I started reading these in the early nineties, around the year 2000. I noticed a dramatic shift in both the tone of the stories. The content of the stories didn't change that much, but the tone changed dramatically. People began to describe themselves as feeling disgusted by themselves, feeling perverted by the thoughts and feelings and actions that they or actions they hadn't done.
[00:05:26] Speaker C: That was the tone that it shifted.
[00:05:28] Speaker B: Toward, or, yes, away from just like, oh, yeah. So I did this when I was five and, you know, kind of a developmental awareness that was, there's more of that early on to this place where there was no awareness of developmentally common curiosities and thoughts, feelings, actions, whatever, and this real feeling of self hatred and disgust about what they did do or what they had thought or what they had wanted and all of that. And I thought, I don't know what I'm seeing. And because of my background, it was so heartbreaking to me that I literally would walk into the chair of my department's office and cry, yeah. Because it was devastating to me that they felt this about themselves. What they were describing were very. In the, in the scheme of common experiences. Right. So it took me a while to figure out what I was seeing. I was like, I just started asking more questions and trying to understand because I didn't. I didn't know what I was seeing, honestly.
So it took me about three years. And what I realized I was seeing was the first wave of students who had gone through their adolescence in the mid eighties to early nineties. And we're now 25 to 30 years old or so. Right. And I thought, okay, this is what had shifted and changed in culture. You know, in the early eighties, in the mid eighties and onward, we began to introduce abstinence only education, which we now know Washington, mostly religiously based education.
It was 80% medically inaccurate. The whole socio political movement of the United States had merged church and state together. Right. By putting out religious education and calling it something different.
[00:07:26] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:07:27] Speaker B: And then we hid behind this thing called family values, which had nothing to do with family values at all. It had to do with scaring the public and making them believe that everything sexual was dangerous and bad and corrupt and wrong, while providing no education and removing the sex research that we had been doing through the sixties and seventies on, like, sexuality and disability and so many very important places that we were studying sexuality. Boom, money gone at that point.
[00:08:03] Speaker C: And add to that the HIV and AIDS epidemic that was happening that time, I'm sure that just fueled a lot of fear.
[00:08:10] Speaker B: It did. Right? When we had a reaction to second wave feminism occurring at the same time. We had an economic downturn as well, in the early eighties. And then you're right, we had aids. And so what we see when you, when you take kind of what I call a 50,000 foot view over history is that whenever you have a scared populace, people in power in a patriarchy use that fear to control and direct the future movement of the socio political agenda. And that's exactly what began in the eighties. And we're seeing the fallout of that and it's continuing now. It's just becoming more and more extreme as of course, it's now, you know, almost 50 years old.
We also had people who were a part of religious organizations, churches, communities, who were getting an extra dose of this in their youth groups or in their homes or in their churches. And you've probably heard the stories of kids sitting in a youth group while a pastor is talking about how dangerous sex is. And not just don't have sex until marriage, but any unpure thought, desire, not just action, I mean, anything. So basically, if you're breathing that, you ought to be able to stop. You're sitting, breathing and thinking, that's exactly right. Right. And they started telling them this at ten and eleven years old, you know, pre adolescent. So kids are sitting there, they're asked to glue two contrasting pieces of paper together. While the pastor is talking, they're being handed a piece of foil, told to crumple it up. While the pastor is talking, a piece of pizza is being passed around. They're being asked to take a bite of it while the pastor is talking, all of it to say, undo the foil. Look at this crust.
Look at this. What's left of this flower. That's what you will be if you have impure thoughts, desires, actions that you do, actions you don't do, and no one will want you. Basically your damaged goods for your future partner. You will ruin your future relationships and your relationship with God, basically your eternity. And it was this kind of fear that sunk into the lives of people, religious and non religious, because it was so prevalent in our culture. And that's what I was seeing.
And it really changed the course of my career. You know, I spoke at medical conferences and whatnot. Continued to do that, but I started doing huge amounts of research to understand where did this come from? What was the motivation of this, what amount of it was religious and what amount of it was sociopolitically motivated and so on and so forth. And the result of that was the 2017 book, which was eleven years to write it. Sex, God, and the conservative church erasing shame from sexual intimacy.
Boom.
So that's what happened.
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[00:12:02] Speaker C: Well, thank you for the important work that you've done. And it is, you know, shame is just so slimy. It works its way into little nooks and crannies and crevices that can make it really hard to identify and move out. And what do you tell people to look for? So you're seeing these sexual autobiographies come through from your students, and you're seeing the shift in tone.
What did you do at that point? What did you tell your students to look for? How did you start identifying the feeling that they were experiencing as shame?
[00:12:42] Speaker B: Yeah, well, we just began to notice and talk about what messages had they been given, and then what did they do with that information? I soon figured out that the students or kids or clients that were naturally more anxious, just their personality bent. It's naturally more anxious or more earnest.
Those were often the ones that would further describe sexual dysfunction issues like pelvic floor issues, erectile dysfunction, pelvic pain, because their tissues literally had absorbed this. Don't. You're bad if you do kind of message. It sunk into the deep of them. It took a while to also begin to say, like, so, wendy, do you remember getting these messages?
And then, was that the beginning of the message? So in other words, we taught on development. Right, sexual development.
But kids would often be saying, well, I remember getting in trouble at five, or, I remember this at eight or nine or ten.
But then when we would say, well, you discovered your vulva or your penis, probably by the time you were a year old, that was, you can start to reach for things. You understand that your hand is a tool that you have control over.
What do you think the response of your family was when that happened and continued to happen until you started to figure out at about four that you could get in trouble for this.
[00:14:18] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:14:19] Speaker B: And so they would say, oh, no, I'm sure I was just yelled at or my hand was slapped or I was told it was gross or yucky. I'm sure I don't remember that. So it's like you're developing sexuality that was pure and innocent and lovely, beautiful. Part of you.
That was getting shamed from pre verbal forward, and then it just added the ones that you now remember. And then what messages did you get from culture about your body? Right. And then it's all the not good enough. Right. So that we keep our economy going. So as if you got these messages over and over again, and they went inside of you and caused you to believe that you were unworthy of love, unworthy of belonging, unworthy of being seen as good and beautiful. Right. We didn't have an operational definition in research of sexual shame until 2017. It actually came out the month after my book was published.
[00:15:18] Speaker C: Is this Noelle Clark's definition?
[00:15:20] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:15:22] Speaker C: I'm so glad that you bring this up, because I had reposted it, like, years ago, and I'm like, I know I have a really good definition of sexual shame, and I found it, but go ahead.
[00:15:33] Speaker B: Yeah. So, Noelle's work was brilliant. It was brilliant. It won a presidential award. It was so important. And I talk about this all the time because I remember being on the plane reading your dissertation. So, I was on our committee and saying, this is it. This is saying all the things we're seeing and helping us see how it is. That it's a visceral feeling. It's in your body. A visceral feeling of humiliation and disgust. Right.
And that it begins in an interpersonal relationship. Right. Parents often. Right. Loved ones. And then it's reinforced by culture.
[00:16:15] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:16:15] Speaker B: And by that point, we've got an internal critic going, so it creates a feedback loop. And that internal critic is just tormenting us for the rest of our lives. And. And we begin to put forth a mask because we are so certain that no one could possibly love us as we are. And so when someone does love us, we think, well, they're just loving this mask I've put on. They couldn't possibly love actually me. So, what impacts us at the most, I think, significant area of our life for our happiness. And that is how well we can give and receive love. If we don't believe we are deserving of love, we don't receive it, we discount it.
[00:17:00] Speaker C: We say, yeah, and, I mean, this is something I work with every day with my clients, you know, women in particular, who grow up with the strong and clear message that sex is something that is done for a man, or it is their obligation as their wife to have sex for their husband. And I'm just always asking, like, well.
[00:17:19] Speaker A: But what's in it for you?
[00:17:20] Speaker C: Like, why would you want to do something if it's always for somebody else. And I say, you know, if every time I cooked a meal, I was left with a few crumbles, like, probably wouldn't enjoy cooking. I want to read her definition, the full definition I have, of sexual shame, because it is just so good. So she defines sexual shame as a visceral feeling of humiliation and disgust toward one's own body and identity as a sexual being. It's a belief of being abnormal, inferior, and unworthy. This feeling can be internalized, but also manifests in our interpersonal relationships, having a negative impact on trust, communication, and physical and emotional intimacy. Sexual shame develops across the lifespan in interactions and interpersonal relationships, one's culture and society, and subsequent critical self appraisal. There's also a fear and uncertainty with one's power or right to make decisions, including safety decisions related to sexual encounters, along with an internalized judgment toward one's own sexual desire.
[00:18:32] Speaker B: Right. And that last piece, I think, is really well punctuated by the work of Peggy Ornstein. So she wrote a book called Girls and Sex. She later wrote a book called Boys and Sex, both incredible books to be read by people who have young people in their life at all.
But when she was doing the girl book, she interviewed 80 girls between 15 and 22. And what she found was many of these girls, most of these girls felt relatively competent in most areas of their life until they got ready to go out, and then they were putting down three, four, and five shots of hard liquor because they didn't know if they could keep themselves safe or if they had the right to. This is absolutely in this definition, and I know, because I know this dissertation, that the vast majority of people that she interviewed for this piece of research did not come from a religious background. So it shows how pervasive sexual shame is in our culture, that we cultivate it in our culture, even though it has this kind of impact on people's lives. People who were further in a religious context just got a whole nother layer put on top of it, right? But people were breathing this in the air, drinking this in the water of America, and still are, very much. And it has cultivated a rape culture because we continue with the ideas that men aren't responsible for their sexual actions, they're not responsible to manage sexual desire and what they do out of sexual desire. And if they do something, it is her fault. It is a woman's fault. This can be traced all the way back to the fourth century.
Wow. The fourth century was when Christianity became an empire. Religion, because Constantine, who was the emperor, had the power. He became a Christian, quote unquote, and had the power to appoint the new leaders of this new church.
The men were vying for leadership positions through denying the body at that point in history that had nothing to do with Christianity at all. And when they couldn't, because they couldn't, many times they blamed women.
We continue to do this today. Right. So you have an increase in misogyny in our culture as we have just seen women more and more as objects, whether it's in music videos, video games, straight free pornography. Right. This has just been amplifying. So we have this as we're cultivating this rape culture where people don't feel safe. Right.
And I want.
[00:21:23] Speaker C: I want to get your opinion on something. And it's, I don't know if it's related or not, but it was a conversation I was having with a friend recently. So I look at, my kids are still little, but I look at my friends who have teenagers, and I'm looking at the outfits these girls are wearing to homecoming when they're in 7th, 8th grade, and they look nothing like what I wore to homecoming and when I was in high school.
Now. And for people who don't know, they're, in my opinion, kind of scantily cladd. And I was getting into kind of a debate with a friend of mine because. And I have, I guess, kind of two feelings about it. On the one hand, I'm like, good for them. They should be able to wear what they want. And my friend was like, yeah, you know, I don't think they should be able to wear what they want, and we shouldn't objectify them or sexualize them if that's what they feel comfortable in. But on the other hand, I'm kind of like, I'm looking at this against the context of the fact that kids are less relational, less sexual, yet they're trying to express themselves sexually, I think, through some of these clothes that they're wearing, but it's not really matching, I don't think, what they're feeling on the inside or actually experiencing in their relationships with others because we know that they're having less sex than they were. Like when I was growing up or probably when you were growing up.
[00:22:43] Speaker B: Sure. Yeah.
[00:22:44] Speaker C: And so I just want to get your opinion on what we're seeing today as it relates to shame and sexuality. And I. I don't know. It just feels muddled to me a little bit.
[00:22:55] Speaker B: Sure. I think that one of the answers or the way to go about this is to look at what are they getting and what aren't they getting?
Right. So they're getting a lot of media that basically is saying you as a girl are more valuable if you look sexually appealing.
[00:23:20] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:23:21] Speaker B: You're more valuable as an object. You look sexually appealing. Boys are getting that message that girls are there for their pleasure. They're getting that in media. They're getting that in straight pornography. Right. Kids who are queer are getting some other messages about they're struggling to find their own value as somebody who's marginalized. Right. And they're developing in that often a kind of compassion for other people who are marginalized. And so there's more questions and there's more, well, what do I like? And I'm not about penetration in that way or that way. You know, it's like it's a different world. Right. But if you're in the straight world, which the vast majority of kids are, then you still are getting these messages that you as a girl are important by how much attention you can engender, sexual attention you can engender, and boys are reinforcing that. Your. Your whatever beauty, your whatever is, makes you more valuable to me.
[00:24:27] Speaker C: And one hand seems in contrast to this idea that you were talking about earlier about how you're devalued for being sexual, like we were seeing, you know, through conservative movement. But I feel like at the end of the day, shame is showing up no matter what.
[00:24:43] Speaker B: Yeah, no, no matter what.
[00:24:44] Speaker C: I think that's why I'm so confused about the whole thing.
[00:24:47] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:24:48] Speaker C: Because I have to say so. I don't, you know, I work with the adults who are overcoming shame, but I'm not really in the teen and adolescent world as much. And I just see what I see. And I'm like, at the end of the day, I don't think they're really any healthier. Even though they may look sexually empowered because of how they're dressing, I don't think they really are.
[00:25:06] Speaker B: So what's going on? Looking at what they're not getting. They're getting and what they're not getting.
[00:25:11] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:25:12] Speaker B: If kids are and we don't, we have.
In the United States, there are only 18 states right now, and that's only increased by three in the last decade or more.
18 states that have passed laws that their sex education, whatever they have, must be medically accurate. Ten or 18 if kids are getting along the way. So, example in the k through three, if they're getting lessons and practice around boundaries or what respect is or what listening is or what's important to them how to express that, how to figure out what their values are, what it means to be a good friend, what it means to not be a good friend.
What are my feelings? How do I put words to them?
What's my family? I mean, just relational, social, interpersonal education. Right. Right.
Then they're learning the beginning of body autonomy, they're learning the beginning of boundaries, they're learning the beginning of consent, they're learning the beginning of voice, of individual power. Right. Then beginning in 3rd, 4th, 5th grade, we start to build onto that, teaching reproduction, teaching STI prevention, contraception. And we build on these things and, and we talk about power. We talk about what does it mean to recognize that you have the power to hurt somebody who has the power to hurt you? What can you do if somebody has more power than you and you need to bolster your power to protect yourself? You start to have these conversations. Then if you have somebody that has decided that they want to dress that way, then you are at a place to have conversations.
If who, how you dress is inviting somebody who is not aware to treat you in some way that feels objectifying, what are you going to do about that? How will you manage that? Right. Or you can be having conversations with boys about their power and what it means to be stronger, to be taller, to be bigger than. What does it mean to treat somebody like an object? Where do you get the idea that they are there for you? What about them? And gosh, some of the stuff that's even in my book that talks about like the vow of Ona, which is an old, old thousand year old jewish idea, teaches about consent and power and that kind of thing. And teaches boys early on that your job is to understand the other and learn to tailor yourself to make sure that the other is experiencing pleasure and joyous any time touch happens.
[00:28:00] Speaker C: Yeah, I love that about girls.
[00:28:04] Speaker B: Yeah. You teach girls that you are the beloved and you are to be treated with the utmost love and respect. And if someone isn't, you cut them off because they haven't gotten it yet. So you teach her what? Naturally, women in our culture don't learn until their forties and fifties that it is about them.
[00:28:31] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:28:31] Speaker B: It's not about everyone else. And you're teaching men what they don't get until their forties or fifties or sixties sometimes. And that is that relationships are what drive your life and life's happiness, not your accumulation of stuff. Right.
But if we don't teach this, then kids are vulnerable, I often say was like throwing them to the wolves and then expecting them to have good relationships or know how to.
[00:28:56] Speaker C: Oh, I know they don't. I interviewed someone else on my podcast recently who was of the belief that really all sex education in schools should be abolished, whether it's abstinence based or comprehensive. Because at the end of the day, yes, we know that abstinence base has pretty terrible outcomes, but that comprehensive sex education. And he cited a bunch of research saying it doesn't really have that great of outcomes either. And that really it just needs to be on the parents. What's your opinion?
[00:29:25] Speaker B: That's absolutely not true. In fact, I can cite research and we know from the northern european countries who've been doing comprehensive sex ed since the forties starts in kindergarten, goes all the way through. And they don't call it sex education. They call it life education because you're teaching them how to do life from an interpersonal perspective and why treating each other with respect and kindness matters in the world.
We know that it lowers STI rates, it lowers teen pregnancy rates. Kids choose partners who are more respectful and loving and caring, and those relationships have much more health and less trauma involved in them.
Kids get involved with sex later. We know this from the northern european research. They get involved with sex later and when they do, they make safer choices for them physically and emotionally because they're choosing people that are better for them. But the best part of the research, I think one of my favorite pieces of research is that kids who grow up in homes that are open and provide comprehensive sex education, in other words, age appropriate, they know what happens with each age.
Those kids in adolescence describe themselves as closer to their parents overall. They actually see their parents as a resource to them, rather than throwing them to the wolves and saying, we're going to let media do things for you and we're going to keep telling ourselves that you're not old enough to have that conversation.
[00:31:08] Speaker C: That's what I told them at the end of the interview. At the end, I just don't think I can get behind that idea. I hear what you're saying, but I still don't trust parents to, you know, we know information they need. And it's funny what you were saying earlier about being raised in a swedish immigrant household. So I have a few really close friends who are swedish, and we talk about this all the time, about what they grew up experiencing and hearing about sex and, and how, you know, for them it was like they got to a point where they had all the information and they went to their parents and they said, hey, I think I were ready to have sex, and the parents gave them condoms and they went to the room and it was like, no big deal. And then they hear the stories about, you know, their american friends, to your point, about their slamming shots, and they're drunk in the back of a car in a field somewhere, and it's like these terrible experiences.
[00:31:55] Speaker B: Terrible.
[00:31:56] Speaker C: And, you know, it's just. We're in a weird time. It's like we've made so much progress in some areas, but I think we have a long ways to go in others.
[00:32:06] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. And not in this area we haven't. Fabulous book by an author named Amy Shallet. S c h A l E T. She wrote a book called not under my roof.
[00:32:17] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:32:19] Speaker B: She grew up in Holland, in the Netherlands, came over to do her advanced studies and started noticing, like, what's happening with these families and adolescents and sexuality. Just couldn't believe it did. So she did a study where she interviewed kids in two cities in the US, one in California and one in Washington state. Two cities in the Netherlands. Qualitative. So interviews, interviews, interviews, right. And then she writes this book. If you want to see how the conversations and behaviors and actions are different in the US and in the Netherlands, read that book because it is stunning. The kids do exactly what you just said. They're like, I'm feeling ready. I want to talk to you about it. Do you think I'm ready? And they actually talk about that with their parents.
[00:33:09] Speaker C: I know, and here in the US, like, parents can't imagine having that conversation.
[00:33:14] Speaker D: But it's normal there.
[00:33:15] Speaker B: It's normal. And they recognize they want their kids to have really good, loving relationships and experiences, and so they are there supporting that that happens. If they were concerned, they would be asking questions about, well, what makes you sure that this person puts your needs first as well? Tell me more about that, because I don't see that they actually talk it all through. I grew up in that. I have friends that I trained when their kids were really little, and then I watched them do that, and they're now graduating their oldest, and their kids are just so solid in their relational experiences.
I know for a fact that the research supports that. And I've watched it happen, and I know from my own family history, just watching how people in my family have done things that you would never say to a kid, you're going to drive a car when you're 16, but you're not going to touch a car before then. I know.
[00:34:20] Speaker C: Or read any manual or.
[00:34:22] Speaker B: No, no, we're not teaching you anything about it. But when you're 16, we're going to give you keys and we're going to believe they're safe to drive on the freeway. Yeah.
No, this is so much more important than that. This is about interpersonal wellness, and that's what we care about on our deathbed. I worked in oncology for a decade. People do not talk about their jobs more when they think they're going to. They talk about their relationships.
[00:34:50] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:34:51] Speaker D: The anatomy of desire audiobook is finally here and I am so excited to offer you a sneak peek. Listen up for a 42nd preview. If you like what you hear, be sure to order it on audible or wherever you listen to audiobooks. And don't forget, audiobook purchases are also eligible for all the free bonuses on my website. Visit anatomyofdesire.com after completing your purchase. For all the details, enjoy the sample.
[00:35:18] Speaker E: I started paying closer attention to the language my clients were using to describe the sex they wanted.
Words like effortless, absorbed, and electric stood out.
They wanted to feel lost in the moment, forgetting their woes and insecurities.
I spent hours poring over client notes, going back through sessions in my head, and listening to people with the larger questions in mind.
What were we all searching for in the erotic realm, and was it realistically possible to attain?
And then it clicked. They wanted to experience a state of flow.
[00:36:01] Speaker C: You have a model for releasing sexual shame, and I'd love for you to give listeners just a snapshot of that.
[00:36:08] Speaker A: Have some.
[00:36:11] Speaker B: I call this healing the mess, the model for erasing sexual shame. There are four parts, and you kind of are doing them over and over and over again and just kind of peeling the onion or getting the rubber bands off the rubber band ball, whatever you want to think about it. But it's frame name. Claim a name frame is first. Get yourself a frame or a scaffolding of sex education. Find out what is true so that you can recognize the myths that you grew up with. Right. There's a lot of good sex education out there. I wrote a book called Shameless Parenting. Everything you need to raise shame free, confident kids, and heal your shame, too. That book is actually proving to be as valuable to people who didn't get sex education as it is to parents because it's broken down, birth to two, two to four, four to six, up to 18, and it says, here's what kids do. Here's what they're interested in.
How was that similar or different than what you got? Mm hmm. If you didn't get it, what difference might it have? Made if you had.
Here's the top kid books. Here's the top adult books for this age. Go to the library and get them. Reparent yourself. Right? So that's frame. Get yourself a frame of sex education.
[00:37:28] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:37:30] Speaker B: Name is. Tell your story. Tell your story to some compassionate, empathic, other friend, therapist, group of friends. You know, do a book group together. Whatever you're going to find, you're not alone. I asked this question around the country and have for years, you know, who grew up in a home that was open affirming around this 90% to 95% of people grow up in homes that are silent. Yeah, or silent and shaming. You're not alone. You need to know you're not alone because shame thrives in secrecy. So you need to find out you're okay. You are always okay. Always. You are always okay. Claim is. Claim your body is good. Your body is good. And how your body is is more determined by your heredity than anything else. But we live in a culture that drives its economy by making you feel badly about you. So you keep purchasing things, fixing things, looking different, whatever. Dieting, you know, the diet industry has fed so many lies into our culture that people don't even know are a lie. Right? You are how you are because you come from that lineage, and that's how your body goes, right? You don't want to go to your deathbed realizing you didn't love the body you were in. That allowed you to love it, allowed you to touch it, allowed you to hug, it allowed you to see, hear, taste, beauty, right? It's a gift. If you get to get up and you're not in horrible, chronic pain, you have a good body and it's worth celebrating. It's the poetry you write.
It's the pen that you write the poetry of your life with. As you do, those three things frame, name, and claim. You're going to begin to aim for a whole new sexual health legacy for yourself.
And that's what you will share with others as you have these conversations, young, old, whatever. And it can change with you. It doesn't have to keep going. Most of the time, people have an epigenetic line of silence and shame.
[00:39:37] Speaker C: And I always tell people, I mean, this stuff will carry on from generation to generation until someone decides to put a stop to it. And whoever that person is, I mean, it is something. It can feel like a daily struggle sometimes to overcome those messages and to do things differently. But don't give up because it is worth it. It's so healing. I think to do that for yourself and then also to. To foster truth and autonomy and authenticity and all the good feels in the new generation.
[00:40:06] Speaker B: Absolutely. And then watch how the gifts that they reap from that, from having authentic relationships, for feeling good in the world, about being exactly who they are and how they are.
There's so much to celebrate when we start celebrating ourselves.
[00:40:23] Speaker C: Yeah, and that's what I always tell my clients, too. I'm like, let's figure out who you would be had you not been inculcated with all this gunk. Like, let's clear it out and see what's in there, because I bet there's something really beautiful.
[00:40:36] Speaker B: I love that. That's just beautiful.
[00:40:38] Speaker C: Well, I could talk to you all day. It's easy to chat with you and you have so much knowledge and wisdom to share. So I really want anyone listening to go find out more and please tell people where they can find out more about you and get your books.
[00:40:52] Speaker B: Wonderful. Thank you. Well, you can find the books easiest is probably Amazon, but you can go to any bookseller, and if they don't have it, just ask them to order it for you. But sex God in the conservative church, erasing shame from sexual intimacy will tell you how we got here and how you heal. And then some of the sex positive stuff that was there, that never got brought forward, that you can now celebrate. And then how to actually begin to weave in sexuality and spirituality together in a way that you want to in your life. Shameless parenting is just going to hold your hand. It's going to hold your hand as you reparent yourself and as you interact with other people, with kids, or with your own kids. And it's going to literally give you everything you need. Like, you don't need to conjure it all up. You just have to keep breathing your own shame reactions and responses, you know, because you're okay. You're okay and you got the shame. We set you up for this, but we can help you heal.
You can follow
[email protected]. that's my website. There's a bunch of free resources there for you, and you're always welcome to reach out to me. And then I'm also on Instagram at doctor Tina Shameless. So d r t I n A, shameless. And I just got a bunch of stuff there. Lots of different podcasts and articles and all kinds of stuff. And you can certainly dm me, I'm always happy to interact with people and encourage them to celebrate themselves in life.
[00:42:17] Speaker C: Yes. And I will be sure to link everything in the show notes so it's easy to find. Doctor Tina thank you again for joining me today and I hope we can stay in touch.
[00:42:26] Speaker B: Thank you so much. It was lovely.
[00:42:28] Speaker D: Thanks again for listening to love in Libido with me, your host, Doctor Emily Jamia. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to subscribe and drop me a five star review. Positive ratings help keep the show going. Don't forget to to visit emilyjamia.com to see how you can access dozens of free bonuses when you purchase my new book, Anatomy of Desire, currently available everywhere books are sold. Additionally, you can follow me across all the social media channels at dremeljamia. Thank you for listening.
